IT takes a lot to get the people of Britain out to protest on the street. But that’s what happened in several cities, including Liverpool, yesterday.

Because for the first time ever, the feral, far-right BNP will be able to stand up in Brussels and declare that they are the true representatives of the north west.

And, unfortunately, although they did not poll a huge vote, that claim in their hands is now just as ‘legitimate’ as any of the other ‘legitimate’ parties who gained our support at the ballot box.

So, what does it mean to be represented by the BNP? What can we expect of the odious Nick Griffin once he takes his seat on the EU gravy train, drawing an £80,000 salary and up to £250,000 a year in office expenses?

I am not a native of Liverpool, having been brought up in the Lancashire town of Burnley which, in 2000, saw the BNP secure three seats on the local council. It was a disaster for the town, and guaranteed that wherever I went, the first statement I heard was ‘Oh, they’re all racists, aren’t they?’

The answer is, of course, no, but mud sticks. But now their mud is not just sticking to the walls of town halls, but to the walls of the European Parliament.

Whenever the BNP is accused of racism, Griffin’s inevitable response is to claim it’s all a media conspiracy against a party that wants to genuinely represent British people.

Take a look at their constitution: membership of the party is restricted to ‘indigenous, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse folk communities of Britain’. Only those meeting these criteria need apply. Still not a racist party?

You can almost hear the strains of Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries, a favourite of Hitler’s which, I was informed by one member of the public last week, the party had been blaring out from its ‘Truth bus’ last month.

Where over the earlier part of this decade they have tried to present themselves almost as ‘the acceptable face of racism’, they have now cast that white-collar bluff by the wayside.

Fortunately, Liverpool has shown that it rejects racism – or should it be, all but the 5,308 who voted for the BNP have – making sure the party fell into sixth place behind Labour, the Lib Dems, UKIP, the Greens and the Tories. Even though their vote is up marginally from their 2004 return, the city has sent them a loud and clear message that to the majority of us they are not welcome.

But, even if their poll in the area has been slight, the way the party has exposed itself – and willfully campaigned as – a quasi-militant fascist outfit, means that we should by no means relax.

Any of us who have followed their campaign will have seen the return to form. Their tactics are based on the politics of fear, and where they cannot convince voters to be fearful of multiculturalism, they turn instead to intimidation. Gone are the suited, side-parted campaigners of three or four years ago, and in their place are the skin-headed, bovverboys we all know them to be. They knew they only needed to get eight per cent of the vote, and as such, were confident there were enough cut and dried racists out there for them to give up on the charade that they are simply ‘people like us’.

So, what can we expect? We can expect them to go to Europe and form a racist coalition with all the other extremist parties across the continent, all of whom have been capitalising on the economic doom and gloom.

We can expect them to waste time getting apoplectic over Imperial weights and measures, we can expect them to devote hundreds of thousands of tax-payers’ money to xenophobic, racist campaigning.

The party says the failure to stop it gaining a seat representing the north west will make those against them nothing more than “an irrelevant footnote” to history.

Well, let’s see. The chances are, after five years of these clowns in Europe, the voters of Merseyside will do as they have this time and strike the BNP out of the history books altogether.